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each drawing I do of my face is uglier than the last. god sends me hands I can’t use and prays for his hair. if I have a daughter, she is returning items to a small mirror. keep me if I don’t.
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it’s the day after jesus dies and father is a nightmare. I am the right size to change out his cigarette and I’m good at it. people in handcuffs pray over his legs.
father is a dream. a tree you notice in the dark- mom said that. mom says also that an ant’s heart is everywhere. everywhere in the ant.
jesus wants to be human. my brothers lift his body because my brothers do not yet know that neither will want to put it down. I mean to see them off but am rooted in what the future for a moment believes.
mother is not two people but she does go up and down the stairs as if she’s visiting two museums showing the same coffin. for every other step there’s a step that’s not. if my mouth at night is open, she sleeps outside in the ribs of a…
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some medicines / don’t work / how lonely
–
change diapers
else
you invent
evangelism
–
suicide, all those dates I didn’t
–
formless herself, she makes an image. animals
were the end
of god
dream is a boy dressed as his abuser sizing aquariums for the hand of a spider
the cricket
makes sense
because it looks
like silence
is doll
always
or never
sick
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
poems by Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books, 2017
~
review by Barton Smock
~
It has been hard, of late, for me to read poetry because my son is getting older and his sickness, younger. I know my son is not his body, but his body is a crash course in logistical identity. I read Kaveh Akbar’s book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, with its fleeing of density and with its character-driven desertions, and found proof of place. It kept me from sleep’s rootless sideshow, and called to me from its phone booth made of wax. I wrote this note to myself after the first read-through: if blood spoke, or saw- have I ever seen so much person?
I will not quote from the book here, or give guidance from this point, as sharing is sometimes an erasing. I do not think my own appropriations…
View original post 124 more words
the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things
that are also
pills
minus the pills
given
by shepherd
I don’t know what she saw
in that jar
but she’s been hours
rubbing
my head
with a balloon…
dad switches out the bag on her head
and slips something in my mouth
while saying
mouse
in the dollhouse
I doze for a moment and see a priest
pretend to fall
from a horse, and a stork
act
as it should
I see myself
a form
forged
by a twin, a reincarnation
that perhaps impressed
my photographer
son
[hunger anomalies]
your son
he has
two brains
that’s great
but we’re looking
for water’s
stomach
~
[starvation names its food]
ask the sickest boy what a pig says to the pink phone of god
leave fingerprints for his hand to find
have words
with echo-
he will die
he will not die
laughing
~
[death has too many mothers]
in me like a sympathy pain
is Christ, her language
a fasting
echo
kingsoftrain 